Sparkles in My Hair

February 26th:  This is a strange time.  I’m helping to plan a Celebration of Life for one of my oldest and dearest friends on the first anniversary of my father’s death and while my husband recuperates from surgery to repair a severed tendon in his hand.  I’m wrapping up a year of first and lasts with my father while unrolling one with my departed friend.  In the midst of it all is the reminder of how vulnerable we really are.

I should be sitting with this, even leaning in and embracing it; but instead I’m struggling with myself and my inclination to do the exact opposite.  I’m fidgety and multi-tasking.  I have the munchies.  My weekend has been a series of moving from one thing to the next.  I think I’m doing myself a favor, but really, I’m not.  The bliss of ignorance is fleeting; it hides the good with the bad.  Festering feelings erode the psyche.  Now more than ever I need to remember my 2017 word — stillness.  I must be present to properly honor a life.  No matter how difficult, I would rather remember than forget.  Embedded in memories are gems sparkling with the light of love.

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of my father’s death and yesterday was the anniversary of our last visit.  That visit is one of those gems.  It was almost as if he’d known it would be our last.  He was an 87 year old man recovering from hip replacement surgery felled by a severely infected gallbladder.  He’d been in the hospital for several weeks moving from ICU to surgery to post-op recovery and while progress was being made, each day felt illusory.  I accepted this.  I visited several days a week not with the belief that I could help make him better, but with the desire to be with him in his final days, to maybe even provide some modicum of comfort.

We spent very little time together except for the few years out of college when I attempted to work for him in his business.  After doing some soul work I let go of the feeling that I didn’t measure up.  I replaced it with a sense that while he did not show love in ways that I would’ve liked, while he could not express his love for me, he showed me love the best way he knew how.  This freed me to recognize and accept love in any form.  It removed barriers.  I took advantage of this, his various medical conditions, and the flexibility of my job and visited him at every opportunity.

I expected to find him as despondent on our last visit as he’d been on the previous visit.  But he was not.  While he was obviously weak, he was alert and in remarkably good spirits.  His was a tiny single-bed hospital room on the floor where they monitor post-op patients, so small I had to squeeze myself into the corner whenever staff came in to administer care.  Warm winter light of the desert illuminated the room.  Two friends visited and the four of us joked and laughed as if nothing was amiss.  Physical therapy arrived.  I realized in that session how weak he really was; more so than after his hip fracture, after the failed pin in his hip, and after his hip replacement surgery almost 5 months later.  He was unable to hold himself upright without assistance.  I’ve had a lot of exposure to skilled nursing facilities through my job and I remember thinking if he could just get there, to a place used to taking care of elderly patients with long term care needs, how much better off he would be.  I was fooling myself, buoyed by his good spirits.

And then it was just the two of us.  I sat next to his bed, leaning in close so that he could hear me and read my lips.  He expressed concern for the ongoing care of my stepmother, a concern I thought unnecessary simply because I believed he would be around to continue to instruct her caregiver.  He appeared to have turned a corner after all.  I asked about her feelings for me, having heard so much gossip over the past year to contradict her behavior towards me.  It was a quiet conversation about things we normally didn’t talk about.  And then he leaned in and looked at me intently.  “You have sparkles in your hair”, he said.

I can’t remember a time when he’d noticed or commented on such a tiny, personal, joyful detail.  It’s the most intimate thing I ever remember my father saying to me.

Two days later he was gone.  In the openness I created for myself I found a gem.  I hang onto it like it’s treasure.  So on this day, the eve of the anniversary of his death, I say thanks to have had such a moment with my father.